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Book a place on the University's next open day and come along to the department for taster talks, a session in our teaching laboratory, an observatory demo and more. Talk to staff and current students and get a real feel for what undergraduate life as a physicist is like.

On June 15 at 7:00pm there will be another School of Physics and Astronomy public talk. We are delighted to welcome QMUL alumna Prof. Rosemary Wyse of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Johns Hopkins University, USA. Prof. Wyse is an astronomer with an international reputation whose research interests include galaxy formation, composition and evolution. She will speak about “Our Home, the Milky Way Galaxy”. All are welcome, admission is free. Further details and book a place here.

Astronomer Guillem Anglada-Escudé of the School of Physics and Astronomy has been named by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people of 2016. His inclusion on this prestigious list, in the Pioneers category, recognises his discovery of the exoplanet Proxima b, in orbit around the nearest star to Earth (bar the Sun, of course). This was one of the most exciting results ever in the field of exoplanet research and has been widely reported in the scientific and popular media. The planet, which has a mass just a little larger than the Earth’s, lies within the habitable zone around its host star, where liquid water could be present on the planet’s surface — making it a candidate for the existence of some kind of life.

QMUL physics student Kieran Hashmi has recently returned from the trip of a lifetime — experiencing astronaut training in Russia’s famous cosmonaut training complex.

Kieran’s visit began in Moscow’s Red Square, the scene of Yuri Gagarin’s celebratory parade after his return from space in 1961, and he also visited what remains of Russia’s own space shuttle, the Buran, which was destroyed in 2002 when its hangar collapsed.

School pupils from across London presented their cutting-edge physics research at a conference hosted by Queen Mary University of London (QMUL).

‘Cosmic Con’ was the culmination of months of work from the schools which undertook projects on planet hunting, detecting cosmic rays and analysing sounds recorded in space by satellites.

The schools were introduced to the research by QMUL’s Research in Schools programme which set students up to work on projects and allowed them to design and conduct their own studies in small groups. The results were then presented at the People’s Palace on March 29.

At a ceremony on 28 March it was announced that Queen Mary University of London has won the prestigious Guardian University Award for Research Impact, for the Pale Red Dot campaign which culminated in the discovery of a planet in orbit around Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to the Solar System. Pale Red Dot was a web-based public outreach campaign that provided a unique insight into the process behind the science. A collaboration between QMUL and the European Southern Observatory (ESO), whose telescopes played a vital role in collecting the highly accurate data needed, the Pale Red Dot campaign brought progress reports, blog posts and exciting images to a global public audience.

To mark Global Astronomy Month, and following on from the BBC's Stargazing Live TV programmes, the School of Physics and Astronomy is holding an evening of astronomical entertainment at the Mile End campus on Tuesday 4 April. Talks, exhibits and, weather permitting, a chance to view the skies through our telescopes on the lawn. Further details can be found here.